One of the most neglected features of cloud backups that people overlook is backing up your pictures. Consider this: you go to a birthday party, awards dinner or vacation and take a lot of pictures, either on a camera or your mobile phone. You might upload a few to Facebook or Instagram. But the bulk of the pictures sit there taking up space, not getting viewed. You forget about them until your camera or phone gets stolen or gets damaged. And then you realize that you cannot get to your photographs. They are gone.

Even though you had months to backup your photographs, you never got around to doing it and now it is too late. This is sad.

It is sad because it is very easy to backup photographs. This is not a sophisticated process nor a cerebral one. It requires discipline to copy your photos off after the event and storing them in a place that will get backed up to the cloud. It could be a large terabyte hard drive. That’s a good first step of backing up of getting the images off the device. At some point, the camera will fill up with pictures, so it is best to keep it close to empty.

Once you move the pictures to the hard drive, start up your online cloud backup software. If you do not have any programs, get yourself a Carbonite offer code, which gives you a great discount on great backup software. The Carbonite software installs easily, quickly and painlessly. In just a few minutes, you will be backing up all of your pictures to the cloud.

Once you have the program all configured, you can forget about it. Just copy your pictures to a particular folder on your computer and Carbonite does the rest. It will detect new photographs and copy only those that have not been backed up. You now have a second copy of your pictures.

This second copy is important for several reasons.

First, you can retrieve these pictures from any computer. Just login to your Carbonite account and start the retrieval process.

Second, you will always have a copy of the pictures. You could lose your computer, your camera and your external hard drive and you could still get the pictures back. A storm or fire could wipe you out but since you stored the pictures off-site on Carbonite’s computers, you can always get them back.

If only the rest of our possessions were like that.

So now you have peace of mind that one part of your priceless memories are permanently backed up and retrievable on demand. There is no way to replace your photographs once they are gone. There is no way to go back and reshoot them. Physical objects can be replaced, perhaps at great cost, but pictures of loved ones cannot.

You should get into the habit of regular backups. The ideal is as soon as you complete your photography. Every minute that goes by is another minute of risk. Don’t wait another minute to start backing up.

If you spend two or more hours a day at the computer, you would benefit from an ergonomic evaluation of your workspace.

Hello, my name is Carrie Schmitz. For more than 10 years, I’ve been involved in educating people about the importance of office ergonomics. The ergonomic equation for comfortable computing is the method I employed to help people understand how to apply ergonomics to their own situations. The guiding principle behind the ergonomic equation is that your computer should adapt to you, not you to the computer. Forcing your body to conform to the computer can result in fatigue discomfort and pain, which over time may develop into more serious disorders.

The ergonomic equation can help you avoid computer related disorders and faster productivity with practical recommendations relating to posture, movement, and rest. You can evaluate your computer workspace in just a few minutes using a yardstick and level, or a measuring tape and ruler, along with the workspace planning tool located at the computing comfort website. At the top for the planning tool, you’ll see a bar with several numbers. Choose the number that corresponds to your height. The planning tool automatically populates the appropriate values for eye, elbow, and seat height.

Print the planning tool worksheet and record the values that appear on your screen. It’s worth mentioning that the planning tool values are based on anthropometric data that represents an average dimension of a person of a given stature. The values do not account for variations due to gender, age, or body type. You should consider the values as a place to start, not necessarily the measurement you will end up with. Of importance is making sure you have a reliable and regular backup of this information by using Carbonite – check out the deals here. Howard Stern sits all day every day and he has to pay attention to posture. With that in mind, let’s see how the dimensions of your current work computer workspace compares to the planning tool values.

First measure the height of your chair. You may find it easier to do this by placing the level or yardstick across the seat. Write the seat height on the worksheet next to the value provided by the planning tool. This measurement corresponds to the knee height of a person of your stature. Now measure the height of the surface where you use your keyboard. Write the keyboard height on the worksheet next to the planning tool value. The keyboard height corresponds to the sitting elbow height of an average person of your stature. Finally, calculate the height of your monitor screen from the floor by adding the keyboard surface height to the distance between the top of the keyboard surface and the top at the monitor screen.

Write the monitor screen height on the worksheet next to the planning tool value. Monitor screen height corresponds to the sitting eye height of person of your stature. Take a moment to look at any differences that appear between the planning tool values and the actual heights of your chair, keyboard surface, and monitor screen. It is not uncommon for people to find a wide discrepancy between them. If this is the case for you, don’t be alarmed; the real purpose of the worksheet is to demonstrate the close relationship that exists between your body and your computer equipment; the seat height is based on knee height; the keyboard height matches the height of the elbows; and the top of the monitor screen depends on the level of the eye. his awareness is the first step you’ll take toward making the computer adapt to you.

The second step is to apply this new awareness by positioning your monitor and keyboard to match your dimensions. Let’s focus on your chair; the height of the seat should allow you to place your feet flat on the floor. This way, you can use your feet to support and balance the rest of your body. Maintain a space about three fingers width between the back of your knees and the edge of the chair to allow good circulation. Toward that end, it may help to tilt the front of the seat forward a bit so that your knees are slightly lower than your hips.

The back of the chair should assist in maintaining your spine’s natural S-shape, with a slight lumbar curve. The backrest should be slightly inclined so that when you sit in the chair you can sway back and forth to maintain and establish a balanced position, and so that you can use it for support if you lean backwards. Once your chair is at the correct height, it is time to assess the position of the keyboard and mouse. While typing and mousing, keep your elbows close to your sides with your forearms at about 90 degrees to your upper arms. Your wrists should remain at the same level as your forearms, with your fingers dropping naturally from your hand to the keyboard and mouse. Think of them as like a waterfall.

It is important that you avoid extreme angles in the wrist. Use a palm support wrist rest or keyboard tray with negative tilt to maintain a straight line going from your forearm, wrists and hands. If you need to raise the chair in order to get your elbows at the right level for the keyboard, you can use a foot rest to maintain the correct sitting posture. Remember; in order for your feet to provide support and balance to the rest of your body, they must be flat on the floor or foot rest.

The final computer component to undergo evaluation is the monitor screen. Position the top of your monitor screen at eye height. Tilt your monitor back 10 degrees to 20 degrees to keep the same focal length as your eyes scanning from the top to bottom the screen. Position your monitor no closer than 20 inches from your eyes. A good rule is an arm’s length distance. The larger the screen, the more distance you want. Change your position and the position of your display and keyboard to accommodate reflexive changes in your posture.

The evaluation of your workspace coincides with the posture component of the ergonomic equation; that is, to organize your computer equipment to complement your body’s neutral posture in order to minimize muscle fatigue. For more information about the ergonomic equation, please visit our computing comfort website. Thank you!

What is system restore? System Restore uses something called System Protection to create and receive restore points on a computer at regular intervals, and when you make changes to your system such as installing new software, patches, and those ever popular Microsoft updates. The regular intervals by default are at 12 a.m. every day.

How does system restore help me? It will restore your computer to an earlier time. For example let’s say that I have installed some software on my computer, and after doing such becomes unstable; maybe it’s crashing, or let’s say that I’ve gotten a virus, maybe through email or a corrupted file from a coworker, some malware, something like that. I’ve uninstalled that software, maybe have run my anti-virus software, but yet still things are unstable. I can go ahead and run that system restore, and it’ll roll back all of those system changes, like it says to an earlier time before these things started happening and my computer will be fine. It’ll be just like it was before. It’ll also go ahead and undo system changes without affecting my personal files, so I’ve created files, I’ve edited them, so when I roll back, when I do that system restore it won’t delete those… it won’t get rid of those personal files; they will still be there and be untouched.

Now let me say parenthetically that you should have an online backup service going on as well and there is no better way to get that done than by using Carbonite promo codes, since the system restore may not work.

It will also let me create restore points manually. What it won’t do though is backup my personal files. Remember we just said; that it’s not going to go ahead and affect the personal files, nor will it backed them up. You’re still responsible for backing up your own files. It will not restore deleted or damaged files. If I’ve accidentally deleted a file or has become corrupt, system restore isn’t going to help me with that. Let’s go ahead now and run a system restore. I’m going to go to my Start button and right here in my search I’m simply going to type “system restore”; and there it is under program’s. I’ll click on it and it takes me right here.

Now the first thing it does is recommend the last restore point that was created, and this happened when I went ahead and installed Microsoft Office Onenote. But what I want to do is show you a few other things, so let’s choose a different restore point. Go ahead and go here to “next”; you’ll see the restore point that I just told you about. It created it on its own when I installed Microsoft Office Onenote. This one here is a manual restore point that I created. These three restore points were created after Windows updates. This is an undo point; we’ll talk about that in just a little bit, and this is also critical update. Now we’re still going to go ahead and use this one, but I want you to see here; “scan for affected programs”, and when I clicked this it’s going to now go ahead and start to see what will happen to the different programs on my computer, if I go ahead back to that restore point, if I roll back my system changes; well right here at the top it shows programs and drivers that will be deleted, and OneNote is going to go ahead and be gone. Down here, programs and drivers that might be restored. These programs may not work correctly, and there’s none detected so that’s good.

So the only thing we’re going to have to deal with is OneNote, that’s fine; we’re going to say that we don’t want OneNote. I just want to show you there it is, right there. All right let’s close this and we’ll go to next; we’re going to choose that drive, because it’s the only one we have, and finish. Now it says once started, system restore cannot be interrupted; do you want to continue? yes I do, but look here system restore cannot be undone until after it has been completed. If System Restore is being run in safe mode or from the System Recovery Options menu it cannot be undone.

This is a new thing in Windows 7, it used to not be able to undo a system restore and now we can. I will show you that when our System Restore is done, let’s go ahead and let’s say yes, and we’re going to let this go. It’s going to take a little while, so now I’m not going to make you sit here and watch; but there will be times when I’m going to pop in because there’s a screen I want you to see and be aware of, so hang in there with me and I’ll be right back. You’ll notice now that we are logging off and shutting down in preparation for our system restore. Don’t panic, this is natural, now we’ll see this screen “please wait while your Windows files and settings are being restored. system restore is initializing…” again, all part of the procedure. Once again the computer is shutting down for the final time, it’ll restart and our system restore will be in place.

And welcome back here we are, system restore was completed successfully. Alright I’m going to go ahead and close that, and let’s take another look at system restore here. See, our first option now is “undo the system restore”. Select this option to undo the system restore done at the time listed if you think it didn’t fix problems or caused more problems. Now you’ll see that OneNote is gone, so it definitely rolled it back there. Let’s go next here, there it is, see my “undo system restore”, which would bring me back and actually it would return OneNote to the state it was in before we did our system restore. And that’s how you can return your computer to an earlier time using system restore. Thanks! I’ll see you next time.

Thanks for watching!

In the summer of 2014, I bought my friend some online backup software. Had I known about the Carbonite offer code for home backups, I would  have used it. I urged her to get it set up, because she had a large number of valuable audio recordings.

Instead, she procrastinated on installing it. She had some difficulty in setting it up, so I told her to contact support. Since she was a busy grandmother and working alongside her husband in their work from home job, she never got around to it.

On New Year’s Day, 2015, I got a text message and voice mail from her – her computer stopped working. It failed to power up due to a bad power supply. While waiting for my response, she and her husband went out and bought a new computer. It was a tremendous upgrade over her Windows Vista machine.

I picked up her old computer and opened the cover. I was overwhelmed by the years of dust, particularly dog hair, that coated the insides. This was why the power supply had failed. She had never cleaned out the dust over the many years of computer ownership. I had never seen so much dust and dirt accumulated in a computer before.

I extracted the hard drive but did not have any hardware with which to connect it to my computer. So I sent the drive back to her with instructions to buy a docking station.

For the next three days, she mused on her Facebook account about how her life’s work was trapped on a hard drive that might not come back to life. She had been writing a children’s book but had no recent backups of it. Friends consoled her with prayers and advice to use online backup programs.

Ironically, she was a prepper or survivalist, and had been preparing quite well for storms or an electromagnetic pulse (EMP). She had several weeks worth of food stored away and even kept her flash memory drives in an EMP-resistant bag. But she was not prepared for this.

The docking station arrived and she connected to the drive to the computer after some initial difficulties. She was able to access her documents, much to her relief. Since the power supply was the bad component, I was confident that the docking station solution would work. But you never know.

We are all like my friend. We all procrastinate on backing things up, whether they be pictures, documents or other projects. All of find the time and energy to do other things but when we suddenly need to restore a backup, it is not there unless the backup has been running all along.

We don’t use our insurance policies very often but we pay for them to be there when we do. Does that mean we should buy insurance policies for everything? It depends on your budget and how much convenience you want when making a claim. It also depends on how replaceable the insured item is.

Memories cannot be replaced. They are one time events that only exist in our memory. If we lose a picture or old document, it is gone forever. Online backups, like Carbonite, prevent those kinds of disasters.